Living Biblically William Stringfellow

The truth is, I spend most of my life now with the Bible, reading or, more precisely, listening. My mundane involvements, ostensibly distinguished from this vocationpracticing some law, attention to the news of the moment, lecturing about the country, free-lance pastoral counseling, writing, activity in church politics, maintaining my medical regime, doing chores around the Block Island premisesmore and more readily become incorporated into this main preoccupation so that I cannot really separate the one from the other any longer. This merging of more or less everything into a biblical scheme of living happens to me, I think, because the data of the Bible, and that of anyone's existence in common history is the same and the vitality of the Word of God in both the Bible and common history is characteristically similar. So one comes, after awhile, to live in a continuing biblical context and (in that event one) is spared both an artificial compartmentalization of one's person and a false pietism in living. The biblical adventure continues, I expect, forever and ever: always familiar and always new, at once complete yet inexhaustible, provocative and surprising, gratuitous and liberating. Insofar as I am a beneficiary of the biblical witness (in the period between writing Instead of Death and now) the significant change that I am able to identify, so far as my own thinking is concerned, has to do with the abolition of false dichotomies, as between the personal and the political or as between the private and the public. What verified this for me, in an outstanding sense (since writing Instead of Death), was the illness which placed my life in crisis in the period from 1967 through 1969. A chronicle of that experience is related in Second Birthday. In the radical endangerment of the illness, protracted as it was, I could recognize that the death which so persistently threatened me, the death so aggressive in my body, the death signified in unremitting pain, the death which took the appearance of sicknessthat death was familiar to me. I had elsewhere encountered that same death. (Actually, I had encountered that same death everywhere.) The previous decisive exposure, of which I had total recall during the illness, had been a decade or so before while working as a lawyer in East Harlem. There I contended in daily practice with the routine of cases and causes in the urban ghetto with death institutionalized in authorities and agencies and bureaucracies and multifarious principalities and powers. I had slowly learned from that involvement something that folk indigenous to the ghetto commonly discern, namely, that the power and purpose of death is incarnated in institutions and structures, procedures and regimes such as Consolidated Edison or the Department of Welfare, the Mafia or the 59

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police, the Housing Authority or the social work bureaucracy, the hospital system or the banks, liberal philanthropy or the corporate real estate speculators. In the wisdom of the people of the East Harlem neighborhood, such principalities are readily, spontaneously, and truly identified as demonic powers by the relentless, ruthless dehumanization which they reek and work. In my years in East Harlem, I became so enlightened about institutional death that death no longer was an abstraction and was no longer narrowed to merely funereal connotations. I had begun, then and there, to comprehend death theologically as a militant moral reality. Hence, the grandiose terms in which the Bible denominates the power of death began to have a concrete significance for me. When, subsequently, death visited me in (apparently) a most private and personalized manner, in the debilitations of prolonged illness and in the aggressions of pain, I was able to see that this represented the same powerthe same deaththat I had seen before, in quite another guise, vested in the principalities active on the East Harlem scene. Divergent, or even unconnected, as the two situations seemed to bethe one so public and political, the other so private and personalthere was an extraordinary and awful coherence in each situation in the vitality and intent of death. And, thus, the asserted or assumed dichotomy between the public and the personal appearances of death is very superficial, or, it is a deception abetting the thrall of death over human beings. In later reflection, I would press the point further. I confess that the experience of exposure to death and of coping with death in the ghetto of East Harlem became critical to such capacity as I received to endure and survivemore exactly, to transcendprofound illness. The virtual abolition of distinction between the private and the political realms resolves a secret of the gospel which bothers and bemuses a great many people of the church, though they may seldom be articulate about it. Most churchfolk in American Christendom, especially those of a white bourgeois rearing, have, for generations, in both Sunday School and sanctuary, been furnished an impression of Jesus as a person who went briefly about teaching love and doing good: gentle Jesus, pure Jesus, meek Jesus, pastoral Jesus, honest Jesus, fragrant Jesus, passive Jesus, peaceful Jesus, healing Jesus, celibate Jesus, clean Jesus, virtuous Jesus, innocuous Jesus. Oddly enough, this image of Jesus stands in blatant discrepancy to biblical accounts of the ministry of Jesus familiar to everyone. Jesus is known to have been controversial in relation to his family and in synagogue appearances, to have suffered poignantly, to have known complete rejection of intimates no less than enemies, and to have been greeted more often with apprehension than acclaim. More particularly, this notion of an innocuous Jesus contradicts the notorious and turbulent events now marked as Holy Week in which the historical Jesus is pursued as a political criminal by the authorities, put to trial and condemned, mocked and publicly humiliated,

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executed in the manner customarily reserved for insurrectionists, and, all the while, beheld by his followers with hysteria and consternation. While the traditional churches have invested so much in the innocuous image of Jesus, they have not been able to suppress and remove from common knowledge the public clamor of Holy Week. This has placed churchpeople in the predicament of having two simultaneous conflicting views of Jesus with little help available as to whether the two are reconcilable and, if not, as to which is to be believed. I think most just linger in the quandary. I recall, as a younger person, how uneasy I used to feel in church when Lent, especially Holy Week, would happen and when, suddenly, it seemed, all that we have been told during the other church seasons about Jesus would be refuted in the recital of gospel accounts. There were those obvious questions which were never raised. Why, if Jesus was so private, so kind, so good, was he treated like a public criminal? Why would the State take any notice of him, much less crucify him? I became aware that others felt this discrepancy, too, and that some met it by steadfastly concentrating on the idea of an innocuous Jesus since that convenienced their way of life and helped to overlook the contrary evidence of Holy Week and the disquiet it occasioned. Some others opted the other way. They "ideologized" Jesus, rendering him a mere political agitator. I found both of these attempts deeply unsatisfactory, both being narrow and acculturated versions of Jesus, the one pietistic, the other political. And if the church failed to deal with this remarkable discrepancy, one still might have recourse to the New Testament to ascertain whether the contrasting images of Jesus had basis and, then, to comprehend the issues posed in Holy Week. The secret has to do, I learned in the Bible, with the political significance of the works, discrete though they be, attributed in the gospels to Jesus, and, similarly, the political implication of his sayings. Both are cryptic. Characteristically Jesus tells a parable, ending the recital with the remark "those who have ears, let them hear." Or, characteristically, he heals someone in some way afflicted in mind or body and then cautions the one healed and those who may have witnessed the happening not to publicize it. It is only when his parables or his works become notorious that the authorities move against Jesus (the particular precipitant episode being the raising of Lazarus). Why do the rulers of the world regard Jesus so apprehensively: Why is he an offenseand a thieatto their regime? The answer that emerges in the biblical accounts is that in teaching and in healing Jesus bespeaks and demonstrates an authority and capability over the power of death, and it is that very same power of death in the world which supplies the only moral sanction for the state, or its adjacent ruling principalities. Thus Jesus preached and verified a freedom from captivation in death which threatens in the most rudimentary way the politics of this age. The rulers perceive this to be their undoing, once they have learned of Jesus and of what he has said

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and done. Thus, the very events which have been most private or most discrete in Jesus's ministry take on the most momentous political meaning, and if, in the days of Holy Week the truth of the confrontation becomes public, it will be seen that it has been premoniti ve throughout the life of Jesusfrom Herod's attempt to murder the child through the temptations to submit to the power of death in the wildernessportrayed in explicit political terms. It is the coherence of the power of death multifariously at work in the world which explains why the public authorities cannot overlook the ministry of Jesus when it becomes apparent to them that he possesses authority and exercises capability over the power of death, as exemplified in his preaching and healing. In the midst of the consummate public confrontation between the political principalities and Jesus during Holy Week, on Maundy Thursday, Jesus promises that his disciples will receive and share through his triumph over the power of death in that same authority and capability over death in this world. And so it is that his promise is fulfilled at Pentacost, and thereafter, whenever that authority is shown, wherever that capacity is verified, insofar as the Christians live faithfully in the knowledge of the power of the resurrection, freed from captivation or intimidation by the power of death they have already known through the hostility and harassment of the ruling principalities similar to that which Jesus knew.

? ??
A universal cosmic power which is conquered by the saviour-god is Death. Death is a half-personalized reality. He became controller of nature and men when the paradise was lost in the fall. Of course, everything which comes from dust has to return to dust (Gen. 3). But in the original perfection, in the garden of gods, fruits of immortality (and other foods of the gods) gave actual (though not ontological) immortality. In the situation of salvation this actual immortality is regained by means of the sacramental food by those who receive it in the right way (Ignatius: pharmakon athanasias). But in the period between fall and salvation every creature (except some heroic figures who were transferred into the divine sphere) is subject to the power of death (also personified as the demonic "Thanatos," "Hades"). Paul Tillich JRT III, 1 (1946)

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